How to reset the Dock of your Mac to its default apps and settings

Learn how to reset the Dock of your Mac to its default settings with the built-in Apple apps that appear on it when you first set up your Mac.

Customized and default Mac Dock after reset

Since it’s easy to customize your Dock, you may have added or removed apps from it, changed its size, switched its location, turned on magnification, set it to auto-hide, and more.

However, if you have had enough of the tweaks and want to get back to the original Dock, you can use a simple Terminal command to reset and restore it. Once that’s done, your Dock will look similar to what it was when you booted your new Mac.

Of course, you can again customize your Dock and add or remove apps and change its settings after resetting.

Reset Mac’s Dock to factory settings

  1. Open Terminal on your Mac.
  2. Type or copy & paste the following command in the Terminal window and hit the return/enter key.
defaults delete com.apple.dock; killall Dock

The Dock will reset and restart immediately. This command has reset your Dock by removing any icons that you’ve added and restoring any icons that you removed. Among other things, it also resets the size of the Dock, its magnification settings, and its location.

Keep in mind that if you’ve uninstalled any of the default apps that the Dock contains (like Pages, Numbers, Keynote), they will appear as question marks “?” icons until you either remove the placeholder from the Dock or reinstall the missing apps.

Note: In a weird turn of events, resetting the Dock also removed all my added Hot Corners!

For those of you who might not feel comfortable with this process, here it is demonstrated on video.

Sometimes it’s just nice to start from scratch, and this is one step that’ll help you do just that.

What do you think?

Do more with Dock: